


Lonely Roots

by RoeDusk



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, Platonic Hanahaki, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22310077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoeDusk/pseuds/RoeDusk
Summary: Based on a rant I had about Hanahaki to a friend.  This is more how I feel the disease would go, using trope rules as they were explained to me.
Relationships: Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	Lonely Roots

**Author's Note:**

> Have I mentioned I hate Hanahaki? Because I _hate_ it. I hate that it's a popular romantic trope. Because that lingering ache of not wanting to cut off someone who takes more than they give even tho it makes your chest ache and breathing difficult isn't romantic, it's emotional trauma and it can be a part of every serious relationship from friends to family to lovers.
> 
> Why am I even writing this?

It started before Noctis can remember. Not some grand romantic event the way stories always make it out to be, but a bitter sort of longing that constricted in his chest on the worst days.

The first time he coughs up clovers his nursemaid panics, but quickly assures herself nothing is wrong. Children are always putting odd things into their mouths, and the clover in Insomnia aren't poisonous. He gets a lecture about not eating strange plants, and his protests that he hadn't are ignored.

The next time he coughs up clover is at a quiet dinner, sitting on the far side of a large table in silence, wondering if his father even wants him there. This time there is blood and he’s rushed to the doctor. After hours of tests the doctor told him to focus on breathing with a sad smile and took his father away for a private word. It’s the first Noctis has heard of hanahaki, his father tearfully holding him close and apologizing, begging his forgiveness.

They could have removed the flowers - Noctis learns years later - but any fondness he had for his dad would have gone with them, cut out of his life entirely. He’s happy they remain. That his father chose to spend more time with him, keeping the poison rooted in his lungs under control, rather than go ahead with the surgery to save his life. The doctor believed that with enough time - and love - the clover would go into remission, and there would be no need for the surgery. It slowed over the years, but Noctis never quite made it that far. After a while he learned to manage the pain, swallow the clover down before letting them show. His father didn't need the added worry and he could manage this much.

Besides, it wasn't like he was all alone. He had a friend, and protectors all around. Ignis's friendship took the bitter edge of loneliness away, helping stop the clenching of his chest that sometimes lead to a chest rattling cough when he spent to long away from his father. Noctis was happy, and the clovers were few and far between these days.

The Maralith changed all that. Or maybe it was the prophecy that did. When he woke Ignis was far from his side, an entire continent away, and Noctis could barely move. The Oracle helped him. Luna helped where she could as well, but it was also Luna who asked him about the roots she couldn't banish from his lungs. The clover burned as he told her, not quite a cough because all his father’s efforts those scattered months were for him, but not gone. He doesn’t realize it then, but his father is pulling away again, aching from the truth of a prophesy he could not prevent. This is the closest the clovers will ever be to disappearing.

(He wonders if Luna caught it from him, the seeds of hanahaki he inherited from his mother. Wonders if it was his fault she died with her lungs full of palest heather. Ravus blames him, he knows, but he still remembers pressed flowers on a page tipped in dried blood, commiseration between two battered children, and how deeply Luna missed her brother.)

When he returns to Insomnia, Tenebrae burning behind them, Ignis is no longer the friend he knew. In Noctis’s absence the older boy had to grow up, facing fears of losing not only his friend but also the Crown Prince. He has training, new duties and new standards Noctis can only fail to live up to.

Ignis turns away from him the first time since they've met, and Noctis has always been prone to flowers. He coughs up forget-me-nots in his bathroom, relearning old tricks, locking loneliness away to minimize the damage. He swallows down both now, when he forgets, eyes always down or away to avoid the disapproval that could set him off again.

It's not until Gladiolus that Ignis finds out. Gladiolus who Noctis’ father had promised would be his protector, his brother the same way Clarus was to the King. Gladiolus who can't stand the sight of him, who can't be in the same room as him without finding a fault. Noctis doesn't even have to check to know there's a new flower in his lungs, he just swallows these down like the rest.

But, periwinkle is poisonous in large doses. Noctis collapses and Ignis is the one to find him. The doctors are in uproar at the state of his lungs and argue that it must be removed, everything, now. But Noctis refuses, cries, and his father is selfish enough to allow it. (His son will die one way or another, he'd rather he die loving him than not. And what a horrible thought that is.)

Back in the prince’s rooms Ignis quietly asks his questions, and Noctis cares too much not to answer. By the end he's being held as he cries, and Ignis promises to do everything in his power to ensure no blue petals ever pass his lips again. It's what brothers do, after all.

Noctis can't keep swallowing the flowers down anymore, the periwinkle is too dangerous to risk. Ignis makes him promise and he strives his best to keep it. But a miracle with Iris softens Gladio enough to slow their growth. He manages, he’ll be fine.

They don't tell the shield, on Noctis' request. Instead Ignis watches extra carefully, slowly crafting himself into a caretaker for Noct's every need, heading off the worst of Gladio's tirades with a sharp look or sharper tongue. It's almost enough to chase the forget-me-nots away entirely, and Noct has long been used to the scattered clover. He can learn to deal with the occasional periwinkle as well.

There's something broken in him now, he realizes, in the privacy of his own room. Sometimes he coughs up forget-me-not when Ignis goes home, no matter that the other spent his whole day reassuring Noct he wasn't alone. Sometimes his throat is clogged with Periwinkle just from expectation, and they don't diminish even when Gladio only slaps him on the back happily before heading home. But he only realizes it years later, when he’s spent an entire Saturday with Prompto but finds himself choking back daisies at the thought of not seeing him again until Monday.

Ignis finds him on the bathroom floor Sunday morning, struggling not to just crawl back into bed. He wraps a towel around his shoulders and and brushes his hair back out of the way. Noctis tries to apologise, for the blue petals if nothing else, but Ignis won't have it.

"Noct. Never apologize for being afraid, for being lost. I… may wish my reassurance could be enough, but I will  _ never _ turn against you for requiring that reassurance."

Noctis buries his head in the other's chest and Ignis pulls him into a hug.

"We are family, Noct. I am here, always."

* * *

The world is crashing down around them, but Ignis still manages to find time to help him when the tickle in his throat gets too strong. Home cooked food and a night in a trailer to help get his feet back under him again. Keeping it from the others is harder, especially between the periwinkle and the clover, the latter increasing now as the news gets worse.

(His father is dead _. Dead _ after sending him away to safety. And he's still coughing up clover. How messed up is that?)

Ignis's insistence on them all working together is paying off though, slowly the daisies disappear almost entirely, and the periwinkle fades amid the clover white.

Until Altissia when everything goes sideways again.

Luna dies and he doesn't have any flowers to give her. Wonders if sylleblossom would have choked him long ago if he did, or if they might now. But in the end he never doubted her affection, and never thought of it as any more than it truly was.

Instead he wakes to Ignis blind, Prompto scared, and the Gladio of his earliest memories. He knows he failed, can read it in every one of the others' pained movements and in the bloody flowers on his tongue. Periwinkle blots out the clover almost entirely, liberally speckled with forget-me-not and daisies. It's a struggle to bite back the coughs before Ignis can hear, to swallow them down before the others can notice.

Then Prompto falls, pushed off the train by his own hand, and daisies are suddenly almost as numerous as periwinkle. When he collapses Gladio finally takes note.

"What the hell is this? Get back on your feet! This is no time to be laying around!"

"Gladio!" Ignis rebukes harshly, guide cane smacking Noctis in the arm in his haste to find him.

Noctis can’t stop coughing.

Gladio, closer, "The hell is wrong with him Iggy?!”

"If you cannot find anything useful to say I would thank you to remain silent!" A stunned beat, then a hand in his hair. "Noct please, we talked about this."

A handkerchief is pressed against his chin and finally Noct lets himself cough, flowers tumbling from his lips across Ignis's knees, gasping for breath as the clawing in his chest slows but doesn't stop. There’s clover mixed in between the periwinkle and the flood of daisies. Even forget-me-nots are scattered liberally throughout. And though Ignis can't see them anymore he knows they’re there nonetheless. They always are when Noctis has his worst attacks.

"The hell is this, Iggy?" Gladio asks finally, slower and quieter but no less frustrated, and Noctis can feel Ignis tense beside him.

"Gladio you are as much a part of this as Prompto or I. Think carefully before you say another word."

Silence. Then.

"All three of us? Then.."

"Platonic," Noctis forces out. "The doctors said it was familial, after I got it about dad."

Silence again, and he refused to open his eyes. Ignis puts down his cane with a rattle and wraps his arms around Noct's back.

"Gladio, go fetch some water from the dining car."

"Right."

Footsteps walk away, and Noctis tries to relax into the hug.

"Noct."

He closes his eyes tighter, but nods all the same.

"I should have mentioned this before, Noct, but… daisies are poisonous as well. I don't know what interaction if any they might have with the periwinkle but… Noct, you can't die from this. Promise me, please."

A beat, a struggling breath.

"I’ll try."

"That's all I ask."

* * *

Within weeks of the returning of the light, the tomb of Noctis Lucis Caelum is overrun with several varieties of flower thought to have died out during the ten year darkness. A memento - perhaps - of what he sacrificed to save, and a reminder to those he left behind not to let his loss destroy them in turn. In the years to come the flowers spread throughout the rebuilding city, eventually becoming little more than weeds in spite of their beauty. But in all the years since they have never been completely rooted out.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully everyone is in character. This made me sad so I may not have reread it as closely as I could have.
> 
> I actually managed to not write this for three months. Only now I'm trying to write something every day at least and today it was all I could think about.
> 
> I did a lot of research into clover doing this fic actually, and it turns out most pasture clover is poisonous, but because most pasture tends to be in areas where the clover is poisonous. Clover of the same species can be either poisonous or safe to eat, but there is a lot of disagreement between sources I found about why. Basically it could be because of environment that lets the clover grow the poison/evolve to be more poisonous, or it could be that the poisonous variety can only grow in certain areas, or that the poisonous variety only mutated at a certain area and hasn't spread that far yet. Basically the best variable they could find for if clover was poisonous was annual temperature, with colder, earlier winters being the places the clover was safe to eat and warmer or non-existent winters being where the clover was poisonous. I wanted a small low growing flower for as many of the plants as I could think of and thought non-poisonous worked better for the plot so I decided Insomnia's clover just isn't poisonous.
> 
> Both periwinkle and daisies are poisonous in all forms, no matter if they refer to the same type of plant, tho the common periwinkle's poison is extracted and usable as a medicine in small doses. Common forget-me-not is safe to eat, and many people I met growing up used it or violets to make their spreads look nice at market. Some other flowers that share the forget-me-not name are toxic tho, so make sure you know which one you have before considering this as culinary advice.


End file.
